Shelley: The Pursuit (81 page)

While Shelley’s boating expeditions continued to take Claire, the Hunts and the children to Hampden, Virginia Water and Egham, Mary tended to remain behind. She was expecting another child, and liked to stay quietly at Albion House, making jellies for the children, and reading Brockden Brown’s horror novels. On 4 August they celebrated Shelley’s twenty-fifth birthday, and on the 30th, Mary’s twentieth.

First Murray, and then Charles Ollier turned down
Frankenstein
, but at the end of the month Shelley’s persistence as Mary’s agent was rewarded by a contract with Lackington, Allen and Co., and the novel was hurried off to the printers. Lackington’s was a good catch, for their circulating library and bookshop, with its splendid circular display tables and book galleries, was one of the most popular in London. Shelley insisted on a tight and highly commercial contract, writing to Lackington: ‘You should take the risk of printing and advertising etc. entirely on yourselves and, after full deduction being made from the profits of the work to cover these expenses, that the clear produce, both of the first edition and of every succeeding edition should be divided between you and the author.’
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Shelley was never able to insist on a similar contract for any of his own works.

With the coming of September, the golden chain of summer days began to dissolve, and the atmosphere seemed to grow chilly in Albion House. Mary noted that the lowered declination of the sun prevented it from reaching over the roof into the garden, and the rooms seemed to become perpetually dark and damp. Later she discovered that all Shelley’s books in the library had gathered a sinister blue mould.
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Her child was born on the 2nd, and though both mother and baby remained well, Mary was constantly troubled by inability to provide sufficient milk. She knew that Shelley would not consider a wet-nurse, and the child had constant upsets from attempts to feed it cow’s milk. Shelley struggled on to finish his poem, but he could no longer spend the day comfortably outside, and he began to feel ill again, and now his chest especially troubled him.
His new daughter did not move him as the birth of little William had done. He wrote archly to Byron: ‘Since I wrote to you last, Mary has presented me with a little girl. We call it Clara. Little Alba and William, who are fast friends, and amuse themselves with talking a most unintelligible language together, are dreadfully puzzled by the stranger, whom they consider very stupid for not coming to play with them on the floor.’
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With a great effort, Shelley pushed
Laon and Cythna
to a conclusion on 20 September. He wrote a dedication ‘To Mary’ —

So now my summer task is ended, Mary,

And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home;

As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faëry,

Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome . . . .
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But far from returning to his ‘heart’s home’, Shelley immediately left for London, arriving with Claire at Hunt’s on the evening of the 23rd. Suddenly he was immersed in business: correcting the proofs of
Frankenstein
, negotiating the publication of his poem with Ollier, and dealing with debts which had been growing ominously at Longdill’s office. Once again he put himself under the treatment of Sir William Lawrence. His health was in a ‘miserable state’ and he gloomily told Mary that he was consumptive and sometimes feared that he would die during the coming winter. His separation from Mary was to last, apart from fleeting weekend visits, for almost the whole of the rest of September and October, and was to worry her into a state of irritation and nervous anxiety reminiscent of the separation of 1815.

Shelley’s sudden plunge into the gloom and despondency of September was caused by the sense of circumstances closing around him once more. There were his debts; the responsibility of Alba and Mary’s complaints about Claire which had increased since the birth of her own little Clara; and the collapse of his health in the autumnal damps of Albion House. A mood of martyrdom and self-sacrifice assailed him, and writing to Byron from Hunt’s new address in Paddington, he described the future of
Laon and Cythna
with lurid relish. ‘I have been engaged this summer, heart and soul, in one pursuit. I have completed a poem . . . in the style and for the same object as “Queen Mab”, but interwoven with a story of human passion . . . . It
is
to be
published
— for I am not of your opinion as to religion, etc, and for this simple reason, that I am careless of the consequences as they regard myself. I only feel persecution bitterly, because I bitterly lament the depravity and mistake of those who persecute. As to me, I can but die; I can but be torn to pieces, or devoted to infamy most undeserved . . . .’
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Shelley now decided that the house at Marlow could never be their permanent
home. This was to be a momentous decision. By the end of September, he was already advertising the lease for sale, and asking Mary to decide between wintering in Italy or somewhere on the Kent coast. Mary was aware that details of their financial difficulties were being kept from her, and when Claire returned from London without Shelley, Mary cross-questioned her. Afterwards she wrote anxiously to Shelley, ‘whether it might be that [Claire] was in a croaking humour (in ill spirits she certainly was) or whether she represented things as they really were I know not but certainly affairs did not seem to wear a very good face — She talks of Harriet’s debts to a large amount & something about Longdill’s having undertaken for them so that they must be payed — She mentioned also that you were entering into a post-obit transaction . . . .’
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In other letters to Shelley she urged him in turn to come to a decision about Italy, and in the meantime badgered him with domestic requests, telling him to get his hair cut, and demanding his immediate return to Marlow. Mary in her domestic mood is well illustrated by her instructions concerning a hat for William. ‘I wish Willy to be my companion in my future walks — to further which plan will you send down if possible by Monday’s coach (and if you go to Longdill’s it will be very possible — for you can buy it at the corner of Southampton buildings and send it to the coach at the Old Bailey) a seal skin fur hat for him it must be a fashionable round shape
for a boy
mention particularly and have a narrow gold riband round it, that it may be taken in if too large; it must measure [
blank
] round & let it rather be too large than too small — but exactly the thing would be best — He cannot walk with me until it comes . . . .’ Several paragraphs later, she cancels the whole request, ‘as it may not fit him or please me’.
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This nagging, carping side of Mary’s personality gradually emerged through her craving for complete emotional security, which Shelley’s temperament could never satisfy.

From trivial complaints about Peacock ‘drinking his bottle’, and Claire’s moods, and her own depressions with the children she turned increasingly to his own lack of efficiency and decision. On 2 October her letter began, ‘My dear Love, Your letter received per parcel tonight was very unsatisfactory. You decide nothing and tell me
nothing.
— You say — “the Chancery expenses must be paid” but you do not say whether our going to Italy would obviate this necessity.’
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Shelley wrote back four days later, with a variety of explanations. ‘We must go to Italy, on every ground. This weather does me great mischief. I nurse myself, & these kind people [the Hunts] nurse me with great care. I think of you my own beloved & study the minutest things relative to my health. I suffer today under a violent bowel complaint attended with pain in the side which I daresay will relieve me but which prevents me today from going out at all. I
have thus put off engagements with Longdill & Godwin which must be done tomorrow. I have borrowed £250 from Horace Smith which is now at my bankers.’
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Mary answered this briskly by return of post, remarking that she could not understand his complaints about the weather since she had ‘seldom known any more pleasant’. She was not impressed by Horace Smith’s timely loan. ‘Your account of our expenses is by very much too favourable. You say that you have only borrowed £250 — our debts at Marlow are greater than you are aware of besides living in the mean time and articles of dress that I must buy — Now we cannot hope to sell the house for £1200 — And to think of going abroad with only about £200 would be madness . . . .’ She ended her note affectionately, but to the point. ‘Adieu my own love — Get rid of that nasty side ache — You will tell me the Italian sun will be the best physician — be it so — but money money . . . .’
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To these frictions, as the month dragged on, were added Godwin’s request for cash in London, and a swelling number of local creditors who started calling at Albion House demanding bills rendered. The news of the house sale had quickly got about. Some time about 15 October Shelley was actually arrested for debt and detained for two days on the instance of his father and his old ally of the Irish days, Captain Pilfold. Sir Timothy’s solicitor Whitton estimated Shelley’s debts in this affair alone at some £1,500.
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But despite everything, Shelley pushed firmly ahead with his own literary projects. His main effort was still concentrated on finding
Laon and Cythna
a publisher. But he also found time to draft the beginning of an eclogue, to be called
Rosalind and Helen
, based on Mary’s relationship with her old Scottish schoolfriend Isabel Baxter. The poem is weak, and Shelley only forced himself to finish it at Mary’s request the following year, at the Bagni di Lucca. It is based on two stories told respectively by two sisters, Rosalind and Helen, which combine many of the private and public issues facing Shelley during 1817, and cover sketchily much of the material handled with infinitely greater skill and perception in
Laon and Cythna
. Rosalind’s story concerns an incestuous love-match, and a tyrannical father; Helen’s story narrates the tribulations of a family life destroyed by her husband Lionel’s political persecution. The emphasis on exile is also notable, and the two sisters meet each other at the beginning of the poem on the banks-of Lake Como, where Shelley was to search for a house in spring 1818.

Lionel, like Laon, reflects Shelley’s own ambitions for radical political leadership, and his own state of spiritual exile. Crude as the workmanship is, frequently descending to a kind of fumbling sub-Skeltonic doggerel, it shows something of the way in which Shelley now saw his role as a writer. Lionel attacked the conventions and superstitions of ‘the priests’ in verses ‘wild and queer’:

So
this grew a proverb: ‘Don’t get old

Till Lionel’s “Banquet in Hell” you hear,

And then you will laugh yourself young again.’

So the priests hated him, and he

Repaid their hate with cheerful glee.

Frustrated by the collapse of political hopes, Lionel became

A spirit of unresting flame,

Which goaded him in his distress

Over the world’s vast wilderness.
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The single important thing about this minor work, was the creative pattern it established in Shelley’s mind of repeating a theme from one of the public ‘visionary’ poems, in a second, more intimate, ‘domestic’ poem. Thus
Laon and Cythna
and
Rosalind and Helen
are not unlike parallel texts. Many of his Italian poems were later to be paired in this way.

Of
Laon and Cythna
itself Shelley wrote a clear descriptive letter to Longmans, enclosing the first four sheets — 64 pages — which he had had set up in print, in the hope of catching the attention of Longmans’ chief reader, Thomas Moore. ‘The scene is supposed to be laid in Constantinople & modern Greece, but . . . it is in fact a tale illustrative of such a Revolution as might be supposed to take place in an European nation . . . . It is a Revolution of this kind, that is, the
beau ideal
as it were of the French Revolution, but produced by the influence of individual genius, and out of general knowledge. The authors of it are supposed to be my hero & heroine whose names appear in the title.’
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Shelley was careful to make no reference to the incestuous relationship between Laon and Cythna; but in a prose preface he wrote that the introduction of the theme of incest ‘was intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life. It was my object to break through the crust of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend.’
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It was a straight case of
épater les bourgeois
, and illustrated well what was implied by Lionel who ‘repaid their hate with cheerful glee’.

In the last week of October, Shelley came down to spend several days at Albion House, bringing with him Walter Coulson, as a weekend guest. Coulson was a protégé of Jeremy Bentham’s, and a journalist of the liberal-intellectual wing. His presence, with his enthusiastic and encyclopaedic talk, eased the atmosphere, and after his return to London Shelley spent a quiet final week with Mary and Claire and the children, ‘writing, reading and walking’ and dictating to Mary a rough translation of a piece of Spinoza.
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